Abstrakt
Jim Crace likes to refer to himself as a "landscape writer". Indeed, in each of his eleven novels he has created a distinct yet recognisable imaginary landscape or cityscape, which has led critics to coin the term "Craceland" to denote this idiosyncratic milieu that, due to its author's remarkable ability of both authentic and poetic geographic and topographic rendering, appears other and familiar at the same time.
In The Pesthouse (2007), it is a devastated America of an imagined future, a country which has reversed and deteriorated into a pre-modern and pre-industrial wasteland so hostile to sustainable existence that most of its inhabitants have turned refugees travelling eastwards to sail for a new life on another continent. Franklin and Margaret, two such refugees, are leaving their homes behind not only to flee misery and destitution, but also trauma and pain from fateful losses of their relatives.
Using geocriticism as a practice and theoretical point of departure, this article presents and analyses the various ways in which Crace's novel renders and explores its spaces, landscapes and places, as well as how it links them with the transformation of the protagonists' psyche and mental world.